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The above is a discussion with famed polymath Nathan Myhrvold, founder of Intellectual Ventures.
Mankind isn’t capable of reducing emissions enough to keep temperatures from rising unacceptably, according to Myhrvold. Myhrvold is a bright guy. He went to college at 14, graduating from UCLA four years later with both a bachelor’s degree in math and a master’s in geophysics and space physics. He went on to earn a master’s in mathematical economics and a doctorate in applied mathematics from Princeton.
Myhrvold is a big proponent of geoengineering to address climate change, and Intellectual Ventures owns many patents on methods to combat global warming. A couple of their inventions include a method to mimic the effect of Mt. Pinatubo's eruption, which injected reflective particles into the stratosphere, reflecting some sunlight back into outer space, thereby cooling Earth for several years in the process. Another invention is for ocean-going vessels to spray sea water into the air; the salt would act to increase marine cloud formation to reflect solar energy back into outer space, cooling the planet in the process.
Myhrvold recently spent time with a startup that has a clever idea for direct air capture of CO2.
Quote:
“At one point in the meeting I asked a question that I ask everyone in geoengineering: ‘You’re acting as if the world wants to solve the problem of climate change. Why is that?’ ” He explains his cynicism: “There are activists who oppose funding or experiments. There’s no evidence I can see that many of the people involved in the climate debate want a solution.”
Amazing that a guy with that resume is still so short sighted.
He is apparently not aware of the concept of limit cycles in dynamic systems. That's the mathematical reason our planet manages to keep itself in the climate range of average temps from 0*C to 22*C in repeated cycles over the course of 4 billion years....
...If he messes with artificial things like injecting plastic beads into the atmosphere, he will surely mess up the parameters that determine the natural limit cycle. Real good formula to ensure doom. (BTW- Has he got any idea at all of how many beads to use? How sure is he? What's the consequences of a minor error in his estimate? How sure is he of that? The hubris is incredible.)
If you'd like to argue that humans are messing things up with co2 production, please first realize that that limit cycle is partly determined by co2 already- no real change to the system. He's adding something never encountered before.
Not to mention-- there has been no warming for two decades now. Do we even have a problem?
The reason that emissions cuts will not stop climate change is because there are no emissions cuts. The emissions are just being moved from vehicle tailpipe to electricity generating plant.
As for direct-carbon-capture, it would be much more productive to capture carbon-dioxide at natural-gas electricity generating plants. But first ban the use of coal.
In fact using green-electricity for direct carbon-capture offers no leveraged advantage over any other use of the green-electricity. Well, because any other use of the green-electricity displaces usage of high carbon electricity
.
We have lost the race to "stop" climate change and the issue becomes much broader than cutting emissions. We should accelerate our move away from fossil fuels to renewables as much as possible but that should be done regardless of the climate crisis. The question now is how to mitigate climate change damages. How to move our agriculture 'belts" to conform to climate change. How do we find, conserve, or produce clean water resources in arid climates? How do we manage millions of climate refugees? How will we manage tropical diseases and pandemics? Sea levels are rising and infrastructure like rail lines, sewage plants, port facilities, and some airports will need to be moved or protected. The winter ice belt is creeping north into former snowy areas. Where I live, the warmer climate creeps north several miles each year. This year we are experiencing the climate formerly 10 or 20 miles south from past years. We will be able to grow palm trees in a couple decades. We might be able to mitigate the extreme impact of climate change by curbing emissions, but we are at the mercy of one major volcanic eruption or ongoing forest fires to undo what short-term progress we make.
This is the biggest challenge to the survival of modern civilization in centuries if not millennia. Climate change is a natural thing, probably accelerated by human activity, but likely to overtake any human efforts to stop it now. Intransigence is not the way out of this problem. We hear voices every day telling us how bad or how fast the climate is changing and what damage is taking place. We don't hear voices telling us what is being done to mitigate the effects of climate change. Things are being done but we need to hear about them more.
As long as stuff is mass produce in China, anything we do to stop climate change means nothing. It's all a scam to prop up taxes and increase cost. Why is Germany burning coal when they want to stop pollution.
Geoengineering is, of course, the only solution. One of our steps as a civilization has to eventually be direct climate control.
To deal with the present warming, an orbital solar shade constellation of spacecraft is the best solution. Station thousands of spacecraft at the unstable lagrangian point between the Earth and the Sun. Add/subtract spacecraft as necessary (or just turn them sideways). This is a better solution than carbon capture or terrestrial geoengineering because it is quickly reversible. It is also “fail-safe” because--in the event of a control failure, collision, sabotage, etc, orbital mechanics are such that the spacecraft drift away from the L-point and the shading/cooling effect disperses after a few days.
I’m leery of atmospheric aerosols or any sort of albedo changes. Those are harder to reverse, take longer, and can have unexpected “downwind” effects (in the case of ground-based systems). I am not confident that we can correctly model how long aerosols stay in the upper atmosphere. Once they’re up there, we’re not going to have an effective way to bring them down if there ends up being some unexpected recirculation mechanism. I think we also run a big risk of the aerosols dispersing in a non-uniform fashion and causing major regional climatic shifts, like floods and droughts.
The effect of a solar shade will be global, reversible, and should be homogenous so it won’t cause major shifts in local or global weather patterns.
Location: We_tside PNW (Columbia Gorge) / CO / SA TX / Thailand
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Add One or Two huge forest fires (of the thousands / yr).
Millions of mature trees lost + emissions that dwarf man created.
Toss in a couple volcanoes.
Tough order to attempt to rule Mother Nature.
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